Hard Liquid: Transparency, visibility, and the mesmerising obscured

Hard Liquid: Transparency, visibility, and the mesmerising obscured, approaches glass not as a neutral state but as a material full of contradictions. On the surface, glass appears simplistic, transparent, and stable. Yet at a molecular level, glass resists a clear categorisation. Scientifically, glass is an amorphous solid: its atoms are arranged chaotically, more like a liquid frozen mid-flow. This strange composition is at the heart of Hard Liquid, an exhibition that explores these intriguing contradictions and how they shape our urban landscapes.

This exhibition presents the material of glass as a physical contradiction. It reveals and conceals, invites, and distances. The environment around the material is revealed, reflected, and distorted to create environments that feel like liminal spaces. This exhibition offers up glass in the hands of the featured artists as a metaphor for the unstable balance between what is seen but remains obscured.

Hard Liquid places the paradoxical nature of glass at the heart of the visitor’s experience, highlighting the works of Laresa Kosloff and David Jolly. Kosloff’s work Stock Exchange 1998 was shot on Super 8 film, displaying a voyeuristic view into the Stock Exchange offices in Melbourne. The video is exhibited alongside Jolly’s urban-scape paintings and watercolours. For both artists, glass operates not as a simple material of aesthetic fascination but as a metaphor guiding the viewer through a layered exploration of visibility and all its contradictions.

Kosloff's work draws in viewers' attention with its smooth movements and striking black and white colour palette. The video effortlessly glides up and down on a vertical axis in mesmerising slow movements across seductive, glossy interiors. This speaks to Kosloff’s artistic exploration into links between the body and its connection to the spaces they move through every day. As Kosloff’s unsolicited recording charts, the internal goings-on of the stock exchange, workers mill around the office as they shuffle paper and converse, but like a silent movie with no subtitles, the viewer is left to fill in the blanks. Kosloff’s interest in this balance between individual agency and free will questions our autonomy in such seemingly transparent landscapes. We see without hearing; we watch without entering. The glass walls of the building mislead us into a false sense of intimacy, and yet there is no certainty as to the true context of what we are seeing. Kosloff’s work captures something essential about how glass structures modern life: it invites the gaze but can refuse genuine access.

Together in this exhibition hang Jolly’s Open and Hotel, both part of the series Liquid Nature 2006. These watercolours and painting echo Kosloff’s narrative to present the impenetrable glassy exteriors of corporate infrastructure. With more than two decades of painting experience, Jolly imbues his photorealistic works with an uneasiness at their monolithic uniformity, drawing on Kosloff’s sentiment of an outsider looking in. His work Refinery part of Liquid Nature 2006 draws on his interest in quiet and reflective works. The oil on glass painting creates the illusion of solidity yet opens its transparency to viewers as they step closer. The personal experiences that Jolly has with his surroundings and his incisive observation allows him to capture dream-like urban landscapes that stand in between familiarity and the unknown. Jolly’s opaque renderings of transparent environments work as a static counterpart to the momentum of Stock Exchange, fostering dialogue across mediums.

Hard Liquid’s layout resists a single path. Visitors may first be drawn to the projection of the Stock Exchange, then expand outward toward quieter surfaces, moving between stillness and motion in their own rhythm. There is no fixed route. The show resists linearity, allowing visitors to find their own rhythm between stillness and motion, between film, paint, watercolour and between openness and refusal. Sightlines can overlap, reflections shift, and meanings surface only gradually. Transparency here is not a state but a process too, unfolding through movement and delay.

The works also connect to broader critical conversations about visibility and architecture. Professor Andrea Mubi Brighenti’s research into space and sociology reminds us that visibility is never neutral; it is always the outcome of mechanisms and systems that regulate perception and power. Similarly, architectural historian Beatriz Colomina examines how glass in modern architecture gives the illusion of accessibility through visibility while simultaneously enforcing surveillance and control. In this light, Kosloff’s silent gaze and Jolly’s impenetrable facades become more than aesthetic gestures and instead become mediations on glass’s structure, the conditions of looking and being looked at in contemporary life.

As glass artist Wayne Pearson has observed, glass is itself a paradox. In daily life, we rarely notice it as it holds such an omnipresent place in contemporary life yet when artists draw attention to it, its contradictions come into sharp focus. It is fragile yet enduring, protective yet vulnerable, intimate yet distancing.

Hard Liquid explores transparency as an unstable negotiation —between light and surface, observer and observed, clarity and shadow. It reminds us that every act of looking is also an act of framing, and every surface of clarity conceals its own depths. This exploration of glass reveals the fascinating material as a mirror of contemporary life and all its contradictions.

Artists: David Jolly, Laresa Kosloff

Curated by Bing Han, Evie Haultain, Enya Hu, Mia Kalis, Jinghan LI, Ying Liang.

Bibliography
Brighenti, Andrea Mubi. 2010. Visibility in Social Theory and Social Research. Palgrave Macmillan.

Colomina, Beatriz. 1994. Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media. MIT Press.

Pearson, Wayne. 2011. “Romanticism as a key to our critical engagement with Australian studio glass in the context of contemporary art practice.” PhD Thesis, Sydney College of the Arts, The University of Sydney. https://www.waynepearsonglass.com/phd-thesis-2011.html.